This Is Your Brain on Advertising
Amber Haq
Business Week
October 8, 2007
Do you ever get the creepy feeling that advertisers know
how to put a lump in your throat, inspire subconscious
brand loyalty, or make your mouth water? Just wait: It
could get worse. An emerging technique called
neuromarketing that uses brain scans to measure human
response to promotional messages is starting to catch on
in Europe—and soon ads may become even more effective at
prompting you to pull out your wallet.
Orwellian, perhaps. But for companies looking to fine-tune
their promotions and boost sales, neuromarketing offers
the enticing prospect of a quantitative way to test the
subconscious effectiveness of ads, jingles, and logos
before spending big bucks on media placements. That's a
godsend for marketers wary of the sometimes unreliable
results of focus groups and other field testing.
What Lights You Up?
Neuromarketing uses state-of-the-art technologies such as
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),
magneto-encephalography, and more conventional
electroencephalograms (EEGs) to observe which areas of the
brain "light up" when test subjects view, hear, or even
smell products or promos. The activity of regions such as
the nucleus accumbens, insula, and mesial prefrontal
cortex give researchers insight into how consumers respond
to specific stimuli.
"Emotions cannot necessarily be accurately described,"
says Gemma Calvert, head of the Multisensory Research
Group at Britain's University of Bath and director of
neuromarketing consultancy Neurosense in Oxford, England.
Using brain scans, she says, "We can see the discrepancy
between what you say and what your brain says, and reduce
the margin of error."
That's what attracted Viacom Brand Solutions to experiment
with neuromarketing. The London-based Viacom (VIA)
subsidiary, which sells ads on the entertainment giant's
channels including MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Paramount
Comedy, and E! Channel in Great Britain and Ireland,
engaged Neurosense to measure the response of 18- to
30-year-old viewers to ads interspersed into episodes of
cartoon comedy South Park. The two dozen subjects each
spent an hour inside an fMRI scanner watching four
programs while their brain activity was measured.
The Importance of Placement
The result? Advertisements for popular "alcopop" vodka
beverage WKD from Torquay, England-based Beverage Brands
elicited vigorous brain responses, while ads for the Red
Cross and reliable old Tetley tea produced much less
reaction. The takeaway, says Calvert, is that ads
"congruent" with their environment outperform those that
are "incongruent."
Viacom Brand Solutions is convinced. Agostino di Falco,
the company's director of research and insight, says the
study fundamentally changes the way advertisers should be
thinking. Marketers, he says, must consider more than ever
the viewing context of each ad. He spent less than
$200,000 on a study that will yield long-term revenue
opportunities—and he is now working with top clients,
including Nike (NKE), Wrigley (WWY), and Colgate-Palmolive
(CL), to incorporate the findings into their campaigns.
The opportunity to help companies scientifically improve
their marketing programs has spurred neuromarketing
consultancies to set up shop all over Europe. In addition
to Neurosense, there's also Vienna-based Neuroconsult as
well as Neuroco, located near London. Some firms, such as
Belgium's Neuromarketing.be, Paris-based Impact Mémoires,
and London-based PhD Media, a division of Omnicom (OMC),
don't use brain scanning but apply cognitive science
techniques to study advertising effectiveness. Among them,
they've managed to snare clients such as Unilever (UL),
Nestlé (NESN.DE), Proctor & Gamble (PG), DaimlerChrysler
(DAI), LVMH (LVMH.PA), L'Oréal (OREP.PA), and film studio
20th Century Fox (NWS), which are probing how consumers
respond to everything from scents to movie trailers.
Ice Cream Wins Over Chocolate
Unilever, for instance, teamed up with Neuroconsult to
test how consumers felt about its top-selling Eskimo ice
cream bars. Turns out—perhaps not surprisingly—that ice
cream provokes even greater visceral pleasure than eating
chocolate or yogurt. Perhaps more informative was a
$120,000 study conducted by Neuroco for 20th Century Fox
that used EEGs and eye-movement tracking to test the
response to ads inserted into a videogame. (In fact, brain
scans are increasingly being used to test the responses (BusinessWeek.com,
10/3/07) of videogame players.)
Viewing a "walkabout" simulation of Paris, subjects were
exposed to billboards for films including Ice Age 2 and In
Her Shoes during their virtual strolling. With a click of
a mouse, Fox was able to switch from one campaign to
another, testing how consumers reacted both to the content
and placement of outdoor media—including whether ads
arrested the eye and engaged attention better on
billboards, the sides of buses, or on bus stop shelters.
Fox even tested whether ads performed better when they
were illuminated. One key finding: Saturation campaigns
produce diminishing returns.
"There is no way we could have gotten this kind of
actionable information from traditional research
approaches," says Melissa Mullen, the director of research
for Fox's international theatrical division, who aims to
apply the results to Fox's multimillion-dollar ad
campaigns. Fox also is using neuromarketing to test the
effectiveness of movie trailers.
Big Brother Fears
No question, neuromarketing has its doubters. Graham Page,
head of innovation at Millward Brown, a branch of
advertising giant WPP (WPP.L) specializing in brand
management and research, questions how much value the
technology adds to existing research methods. "There are
clear implications for marketers," he says, "but the
science is confirming what we know or can find out from
standard customer and market research techniques."
Some marketers also worry about the Big Brother
implications—and, indeed, many companies experimenting
with neuromarketing prefer to stay below the radar. Martin
Lindstrom, brand futurist and co-founder of BBDO
Interactive Europe (a unit of Omnicom), concedes that some
CEOs have been concerned about having their brands
associated with brain manipulation. But in defense of the
field he notes, "Observing brain activity and setting up
models for behavior is not the same as forcing a brain
into making a consumption decision." Lindstrom will
publish a book next year, tentatively titled BrandScan,
that charts the brain response of consumers in the U.S.,
Britain, Germany, Australia, China, and Japan to seven of
the world's largest brands.
There's plenty of anecdotal evidence to support
neuromarketing's potential. In one compelling study,
Oxford's Neurosense linked up with GMTV (ITV.L), Britain's
largest breakfast-time TV station, to assess viewers'
response to advertising at different times of the day.
Neurosense scanned the brains of 200 TV viewers over six
weeks, monitoring activity in neural networks associated
with attention, concentration, short- and long-term
memory, and positive emotional engagement. The finding was
that morning advertising scored better on all counts
compared to night viewing. Prime time, it appears, isn't
so prime after all.
Cognitive Research
Even cognitive research that eschews brain scans is
scoring intriguing results. For legal reasons, French
marketers don't have ready access to fMRI and EEG devices,
which are classified as medical equipment. But consultancy
Impact Mémoires, founded in 2001 by advertising executive
Bruno Poyet and neuroscientists Olivier Koenig and Bernard
Croisile, has developed a diagnostic tool called the "IM
Index" that uses 200 questions to assess perception,
attention, unconscious impact, and emotion. The resulting
score indicates the efficacy of a given advertising
message.
Impact Mémoires has done work for Gaz de France (GAZ.PA),
Renault (RENA.PA), Peugeot (PEUP.PA), and dozens of other
French corporations. "We are able to predict what
consumers will experience, and from there whether there
are positive or negatives consequences," says Poyet. "Will
the consumer want to buy this product; will she or he feel
a greater loyalty to the brand?"
The techniques helped Christian Dior (DIOR.PA) test
everything from music and colors to ad placement and
context before launching a high-stakes campaign for
perfume J'Adore featuring Charlize Theron. Although the
company is mum on what it learned from Impact Mémoires—and
whether it modified the ads as a result—J'Adore has been
one of the most successful launches at Christian Dior in
many years.
Predicting Success
Beyond testing consumer reaction to marketing, can brain
scans actually predict what people will buy? That's the
intriguing premise of a highly publicized study this year
by Brian Knutson, an assistant professor in the psychology
department at Stanford University, and four colleagues.
Knutson and his team studied neural pathways in the brain
related to reward and loss, and were able to demonstrate
the sequence of brain activity that precedes a decision to
buy (or not to buy) something. Having established the
steps, the researchers could then forecast whether test
subjects would buy other items by monitoring their brain
patterns.
Some experts are impressed at the breakthrough. "The study
was a paradigm shift, a move from observation into
prediction," says neuroscientist Olivier Oullier at the
University of Provence-CNRS and the Center for Complex
Systems & Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University.
As more researchers and advertisers dip their toes into
neuromarketing, there's no doubt the techniques will
mature further and become more widely used. True, some
consumers may resent feeling manipulated. But others won't
notice or care—and may enjoy the sense that ads speak to
them in a more profound and personal way. Welcome to the
era in which the client's brain, not just heart, rules the
roost.
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